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Comment by ConfuciusSay | Hacker News Reader

This is awesome. I'll definitely become an avid player, right after I contribute meaningfully to several open source projects, have an active GitHub profile, while keeping my Stack Overflow reputation high, and having a fleshed out CodeCombat profile, and of course making sure my LinkedIn page is up to snuff.

I hope when I get this awesome job my employer doesn't mind me keeping all my profiles updated on company hours!

View on HN

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2yhcqn/were_not...

I especially like your point there that this will highlight people who don't have a spectacular Github profile. Lots of people complain that they have a great track record writing proprietary code and the recent focus on Github profiles is unhelpful to them. Hopefully a Starfighter score, compared to a Github profile, is more fun to develop, less intimidating to share, more meaningful when still "unfinished", more digestible by hiring staff, less entangled with employer IP, and perhaps most importantly requires less "vision" to get started.

We're also not an information source for employers; they can't "query" us for all their candidates to get scores. Anything we ever share is opt-in. We expect most of our participants not to opt-in.

Seriously, this might be relevant to fresh out of college grads with no industry experience. But I have nothing to prove and see this kind of stuff as a waste of time. Why waste my efforts on contrived competitions when I can put them into projects that actually interest me.

”Why waste my efforts on contrived competitions when I can put them into projects that actually interest me.”

How do we know it’s contrived and competitive? Keep in mind that we’re discussing a ”game” that’s not even released yet.

A game is by definition contrived, no?

Why the tautology then? ;-)

For me this is definitely entertainment. Having completed μC in lieu of plenty of sleep I'm honestly a little anxious about how this release will affect my productivity. I'm not looking, but if they offer to replace my interesting, very gainful employment with similar then I promise not to hate them whatever I decide.

The idea here is that this will remove the need for pretty much all of that. My read on it is that it's meant to be an entirely new replacement funnel, not an additional one.

They're going to have a tough road ahead of them selling everyone on that idea, both employers and potential employees. But if they get some high profile success stories, it's possible. Hiring is faddish, there's no reason these guys can't leverage that to their benefit.

Personally, I think it's really cool they're trying this. And that the two HN posters I disagree with the most often (maybe because they post so often) are the ones doing a startup I think is really interesting. They've chosen a domain area that can have huge leverage effects on the industry as a whole (and thus the economy as a whole) if it works. I dunno if they're thinking of it like that, or would admit it if they are, but it's one of those frighteningly ambitious ideas.

"There are too many competing standards for x, so we are proud to announce a new standard, which will supersede all existing x standards and unify everything." -The founders of every competing standard ever introduced for anything in the history of things.

Standards

http://xkcd.com/927/

And sometimes it works out that way.

Yup, ever since I started using XML for every task imaginable I never looked back.

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Fixed that for you.

That is beautiful. Thank you for putting that together. Haha, I'm just glad someone got my humor!

Can we have real arguments instead of snark, please?

Are you satisfied with they way hiring works today? If not, how do you propose it could be improved?

I agree with you (and really am looking forward to Starfighter and don't share the GP's), but I'd like to point out that your answer is sort of incorrect. I can launch a stupid idea aimed at, say, world peace. People can reasonably mock my stupid idea, while not being able to find a solution. E.g if I propose stacking rocks in order to reach Mars, a dismissive, snarky, comment may be warranted. Honestly, if it was Monster or Oracle behind this instead of well-known awesome people, I'd be as skeptical as the GP.

But this is not "stacking rocks to reach Mars". This is a complete unknown where we can't reasonably tell the outcome in advance.

Exactly.

Don't forget to have had a >3.5 GPA from a top university!

This is an especially weird snark to offer on this particular thread, as I have a single semester of liberal arts, and Erin is an audio engineer; only Patrick has a CS degree, and it isn't from Stanford.

Even if you have been working for the last 15+ years (hopefully you don't have gray hair)

No CodeJam victories or at the top of the TopCoder leaderboard? Extensive Coursera certificates? No-hire. Plus I'm beginning to doubt that you've even solved several Project Euler problems in a variety of functional programming languages.

He probably hasn't even implemented a brainfuck interpreter in Scala's type system.

I'm sorry: type checker.

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